There was a heck of a spike in price last night. The 5 minute price (which isn't what Flick uses) hit around $5/unit (most people pay 20c), but I don't remember what the half hourly flick prices were. Their website worked fine for me all evening.

Dodged the high prices last night by coincidentally going out for dinner! Given the frustration people are having with the price alerts offered by Flick and Nodewatch, has anyone the know-how to build their own from the APIs the Electricity Authority publish?

Dodged the high prices last night by coincidentally going out for dinner!

We too were lucky to be out last night anyway.

However, when we got home and found out about the price jump to $5 a unit, we had a conversation about whether this was an issue or not. We worked out you'd probably be better to deliberately head out to a restaurant for a meal out than heat the house and cook a big dinner! (not necessarily cheaper, but it would be a better use of that money for the experience!).

Equally, when you factor in the savings we've made over the year, even if this week costs us $20 more than usual, we are still a long way up on the savings, so no need to panic about jumping off Flick. Yes, it erodes the savings a bit, but not enough to make it worth leaving. Of course, if you can turn non-essentials off during a price jump it helps maximise the savings, but even if you never watch the price and just ride Flick like any other provider, I'm pretty sure most people would still save money over the year.

Given the frustration people are having with the price alerts offered by Flick and Nodewatch, has anyone the know-how to build their own from the APIs the Electricity Authority publish?

I know @michaelmurfy had previously got something running on his pi, but I don't think it uses the api. I think he said it scraped a website.... but not sure. I certainly didn't know the api was available, but that sounds great!

I was the person who was keen to make a display for my house using an Oak (ESP2866-12F based unit - a sort of mini Wifi Arduino), but that hasn't happened yet because the kickstarter got delayed and then their particle cloud integration still isn't fully complete yet (any day now hopefully!). Whether I use the API Depends how easy it is to understand for my poor brain, but it should be better than trying to screen scrape (which is what my previous plan was)! Very happy to collaborate on a project though and pool our skills and coding foo. My end objective was a 2.4" LCD screen with actual price readout and traffic light colour coding so it was easy to see at a glance! Something like:

very cheap (flashing green - eg overnight),

daytime cheap (green),

average price (amber),

expensive (red)

or extortionate like last night (flashing red!).

The situation yesterday certainly made me keen to work on this project at some point so that the info is available at a glance to the whole household without needing to use a phone to look it up.

However, when we got home and found out about the price jump to $5 a unit, we had a conversation about whether this was an issue or not. We worked out you'd probably be better to deliberately head out to a restaurant for a meal out than heat the house and cook a big dinner! (not necessarily cheaper, but it would be a better use of that money for the experience!).

Equally, when you factor in the savings we've made over the year, even if this week costs us $20 more than usual, we are still a long way up on the savings, so no need to panic about jumping off Flick. Yes, it erodes the savings a bit, but not enough to make it worth leaving. Of course, if you can turn non-essentials off during a price jump it helps maximise the savings, but even if you never watch the price and just ride Flick like any other provider, I'm pretty sure most people would still save money over the year.

Totally agree re this. We use 2 - 4 units between 5:30 and 6:30pm usually, so if power's $5 a unit it might cost us $20 or $40 on this odd occasions - which are maybe twice a year in my experience. Given I've saved over $600 in ten months it's a no brainer. Because of the alerts we used less power than average anyway. We also preheat the house from 4pm, before we get home, as power's cheaper then.

Unofficial info from Flick, as I happened to be emailing a guy there. I think what he's saying (ie I'm paraphrasing) is the cold snap and resultant power demand wasn't accurately forecast by the generators, there was no wind so the turbines weren't generating, and there were no other power sources that could be bought online quickly enough. Basically: supply and demand.

That API looks pretty handy. It'd be better if it gave access to the 30 minute prices as well.

Even we were out last night I'd have had heating on, so there'd still be some power use. At least hot water is on a timer, which means we're not really subject to price spikes when we use hot water.

I might be wrong, but I think although we get charged the 30min pricing by flick, that the 30 min pricing itself is just made up retrospectively by calculating something based on the 5min pricing data for the previous 30 mins (not sure if it is a straight average or a weighted average based on total usage across those 5min blocks) ...

Either way, if I'm correct, (which there is no guarantee of because I'm guessing here!) the 30min data would always be out of date by the time you got it because it would be the price you were charged for the period that has already ended!

So to get a picture of what is happening now, we need to look at the 5 min data. I guess you could have a means of tracking the last 30 mins worth of 5min data yourself which resets on the hour and on the half hour. something like:

6pm = $55, no average as data is reset

6:05pm = $65, average is ($55 + $65)/2

6:10pm = $65, average is ($55 + $65 +$65)/3

....

6:25pm =$55, average is ($55 + $65 + $65 + .. + .. + $55) /6

6:30pm = $60, no average as data is rest.

etc etc

That would give you the building average of the 30mins you are in and would just be a trend to give you the idea.

I've applied for an API key, so will see what happens. Hoping for now I'll be able to just create my own dashboard with a POST feed so it self updates (whenever the 5min data changes, they push out the new price). Would then probably run some maths on it to recreate the Flick actual cent per unit price based on the various components eg 20c per unit, rather than leaving it in the $55 per MWh (or whatever the units are for that higher price), as that will then take into account the cheaper network charges overnight in Wellington from 11pm - 7am and will therefore be reflective of roughly what I'll pay per unit.

Based on my limited understanding that's not right. The final price isn't worked out until up to a week after the power is used, I have no idea how it works though. I don't think the 30 minute price is just the 5 minute price averaged. I might ask them, I'm going to see them next week.

Unofficial info from Flick, as I happened to be emailing a guy there. I think what he's saying (ie I'm paraphrasing) is the cold snap and resultant power demand wasn't accurately forecast by the generators, there was no wind so the turbines weren't generating, and there were no other power sources that could be bought online quickly enough. Basically: supply and demand.

Having just moved to Flick (on the 27th May, so I missed out on the promo from the 31st May that they guarantee a lower price, but, just in time for this :-)), looking at the capacity shown on the EM6live website, they were showing spare hydro capacity in both the North and South Island. I thought Hydro stations only needed a few minutes to increase to full output? Perhaps there was some other reasons it couldn't be used (local line capacity, turbine offline etc).

Based on my limited understanding that's not right. The final price isn't worked out until up to a week after the power is used, I have no idea how it works though. I don't think the 30 minute price is just the 5 minute price averaged. I might ask them, I'm going to see them next week.

Sorry, I didn't mean FINAL price. It was still talking about estimating the interim pricing.... but how you might get a approximation of the 30min version of the interim price from the 5 min data. For example, a few days ago the 5min data had a few 5min chunks at about $130 and a few at $270 and I thought, the interim 30 min rate would therefore be about $200, and when I checked later sure enough it was pretty close. (Haven't looked to see if the FINAL price is available for that time yet). So at a casual glance, the interim data must be roughly related to the average of those prices, but of course, we don't know how they weight the averaging, (because if 90% of the electricity in that 30 min block was used at the highest price and very little used during the lower priced 5min blocks, I would expect them to have to weight it more to that high 5 min block).

I'm not talking about getting the right price (even the right interim price).... no-one can do that.... but getting the best guess we can, live at the time.

The FINAL price has various adjustments made for other factors, and like you say takes longer to arrive. I remember reading about it and it is to do with scenarios like when there is a line outage, one side of the outages might get negative pricing, and the other side gets extortionately high pricing, and the adjustments they make sort that mess out. I remember they had some videos that explained it all... but I couldn't find them just now.

Interested in your progress Mike. A really simple app that gives a few key pieces of information could be good, say:

The current 5 minute price

Average 5 minute price over last 30 minutes

Some kind of forecast, but that could be tough to implement. I saw a Flick blog post that says the market sends them information that signals where they think pricing will go over the next four periods? Some kind of weather feed could give you temperature information which could help. Interesting algorithm to write, given it's different for each node.

I'm assuming that isn't a good thing! And that is using their testing facility on their website (it worked once maybe - but not for a while). So unless I have triggered them to block my api key, then it looks like the api server is having issues right now. No wonder I couldn't get it to work externally from here... it won't even work from their own website!